Activities within the grant and expected impact:
MITTRA’s present project is towards an integrated and holistic development approach across 100 villages that are grouped within 13 clusters (group of 15-20 villages), covering about 5,000 households. Also, the livestock development component within the project is envisaged to directly or indirectly benefit over 12,000 households across 450 villages. MITTRA has already been working in eight of the 13 selected clusters, implementing livelihood-focused programmes.

The selection of the talukas for implementing the proposed project interventions has been based on the issues of agrarian distress prevalent and looking at the options of implementing the integrated approach. The key interventions and expected impact include:

	Cost-effective farming, which is expected to reduce the input costs for crop cultivation. Notably, the input costs for cotton would come down to Rs3,000/acre, thereby resulting in savings of about Rs2,700/acre towards input costs
	Crop diversification, which would basically have an impact on the soil health improvement and promotion of multi-cropping. In terms of income enhancement, the diversified crops would provide an income of about Rs5,000/annum
	Farming system diversification, in which the promotion of horticulture (Wadi) would give an income of Rs20,000/acre/annum from year IV, when the plants start bearing fruit
	In-situ soil and water conservation, through which critical irrigation to cotton and pigeon pea would be ensured, thereby enhancing the productivity by about 2 quintals/acre and income by about Rs5,000/acre
	Self Help Group (SHG) promotion through which each SHG is expected to get loans from the Banks to promote strong micro lending within their villages and reduce the loan intake from moneylenders by about 60-70 per cent
	Market linkages wherein broadly, each household is expected to earn an additional income of about Rs5,000 to Rs10,000/annum through the collective marketing and value addition
	Livestock development, which would provide the households with Rs15,000/annum through dairy and goatery promotion
	Promotion of community based organisations (CBOs)

To sum up, the implementation of an integrated livelihood development approach would enhance per household annual income from Rs15,000- Rs35,000. Most of the additional income would start coming from year III of the project, when the horticulture and dairy starts yielding results.